Advice wanted for organising properly

Can anyone give me a bit of advice on organising things easier and more efficient.

I currently only sell on ebay and im only using drop shippers (for now), i use seller manager pro on ebay and have just been saving the copied text and images from suppliers into folders on my computer and i have been using the suppliers product codes for everything, image names, folder names, doc names, everything.

I am looking at listing on amazon soon and also have a website coming and have 100 buy it now listings active on ebay with lots more being listed every week and i can see it all getting very confusing in the future unless i get a good system set up now.

Its already difficult trying to find the products in the ebay inventory, photobucket and windows folders using only the suppliers codes to track back, does anyone use there own codes? or use names instead? also its hard finding anything in the emails using the product codes, also i use one email address for the suppliers and one for ebay at the moment, this is probably only ok for now but might get confusing later, so help on this aswell would be great.

One more thing, does anyone use excel, i can use it but very basic, i use it for my personal accounts but someone else made me the template years ago and i cant make them so if anyone can send me one :)

Any help on this appreciated, any software? any tools? any links? any tips? anything to help me get organised asap.

Thanks in advance :)

I would suggest developing your own coding system for sure. Not difficult, you just have to decide on the best format. For example, let's say you are Drop Shipping a torch.

I would start with something like a code to id suppler, gives you the flexibility to id multiple suppliers for the same product. I wouldn't think that you would need to code the products for each individual sales platform, however that would be easy enough if you felt it was required.

So, if I was Drop Shipping a DVD player from a JVB Products, my code would be something like JVB0000. If you wanted to tighten that up a little more, you could also ad a country code or even state code fro the supplier. So if JVB were from California, then the code would be JVB-US-C-0000, and so on.

If you are selling more than one DVD player, then ad in a model code, so then your code would be something like JVB-US-C-12-0000

I always find it better to code in more information than less, it keep each product very clearly identified.

In regards to email address, I suggest using an email account you get from your website host, unless you don't want some people knowing your website, but it's usually a marketing advantage to get your website URL out as much as possible, and an email address linked to your own site is an excellent way of doing that.

oh right ive been using one email address with my name in like (joe_blogs@gmail.com) for the suppliers and im using my domain email (info@mywebsiteismint.com) for ebay, amazon etc

Is this ok or do you think i should use my domain email for the suppliers aswell?

I didnt want them snooping on my margins on my website and also thought it would be good to promote my personal name to them tbh

Cheers,

Stirfry

That's perfectly fine, it really is a personal choice in regards to how you deal with suppliers, so keeping them on a separate email account works.